Recent years have seen a proliferation of portable electronic devices such as personal digital assistants (PDA's), cellular telephones, and/or other portable electronic devices. For example, personal digital assistants are now available such as the HP Jornada manufactured by Hewlett-Packard Company based in Palo Alto, Calif., or the Blackberry™ manufactured by Research in Motion™ Limited based in Ontario, Canada as well as other brands. These mobile devices offer a range of capabilities, including mobile calendars, organizing capabilities, and electronic mail received and transmitted via a mobile pager network or other mobile networks, etc.
Unfortunately, these devices are typically limited in their capabilities due to the fact that they are limited in their processing capacity and memory size. For example, many such devices cannot execute the many different applications that are available for the average personal computer. Specifically, such devices may not be able to implement word processors or other extensive applications.
When it comes to activities such as printing, etc., such devices typically are unable to perform various tasks such as rendering documents in printer compatible form, etc. This fact can severely impact the usefulness of such devices. For example, a user may find themselves in the situation where they are standing in front of a printer with their personal digital assistant in hand and a document stored thereon that they wish to print. Unfortunately, in such a circumstance, the user may be prevented from printing a document with the printer due to the limited capability of the personal digital assistant.
In another situation, a user may find themselves visiting customers outside of their normal office where their own personal computer or company network reside. At such time, there may be a document that the user wishes to print out for his or her customers that is stored in a server or on the personal computer back at their office. Today's personal digital assistants lack the capability to interact with the network back at the office in order to obtain the document in electronic form. Also, assuming the user obtains the document, they are still faced with the difficulty of printing it out.
In yet another situation, a user may have a laptop computer that has the computing capacity to perform the tasks necessary to print a document. However, the user may be in a location where they do not have access to their usual printer. In such a case, the user may be prevented from printing to any available printer because it is a different model that requires a rendering service or driver that is not stored on their laptop.